Officials in Poland have agreed to hand over the former chief executive of Wex, once Russia’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, to the United States.
The Russian national was arrested in Warsaw at the end of 2024 at a U.S. request issued within a criminal case over alleged fraud and money laundering.
Former Wex exchange chief to face charges in the U.S.
Polish authorities have approved the extradition of Dmitry Vasiliev, former director of the now defunct Russian digital asset exchange Wex, to the United States, Russia’s official news agency reported late on Thursday, quoting his lawyer, Alexander Surzhin.
In an interview, Surzhin explained that the Russian national will be transferred to U.S. custody as part of the case that was initiated against Alexander Vinnik, co-founder of the infamous BTC-e exchange, succeeded by Wex. The lawyer told Tass:
“The Polish Minister of Justice has signed a permission to extradite to the United States my client, Dmitry Vasiliev, who was detained in Warsaw last year as part of an American investigation into a criminal case, in which Alexander Vinnik was also a defendant.”
Surzhin, who represents Vasiliev at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), expects that his client may find himself in the United States in the near future to face charges that may bring him a 25-year prison sentence.
Vasiliev’s odyssey takes him to America after Vinnik’s return to Russia
Wex’s ex-head was arrested in Warsaw in December 2024. At the time, the Polish police said they were acting on a U.S. request, adding that the Russian was in custody awaiting the completion of the extradition procedure. A statement quoted by Reuters detailed:
“Dmitry V. is suspected of numerous frauds, money transfers and money laundering in connection with running one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.”
But that wasn’t Vasiliev’s first time in jail. Polish law enforcement detained him in 2021 when he was wanted by and subsequently sent to Kazakhstan. The Central Asian nation was accusing him of fraud related to the crypto exchange he had been running.
Earlier that year, Vasiliev was apprehended in Italy but released several weeks later, with Italian authorities citing faults in the extradition request. Then in 2022, he was also arrested in Croatia, according to local media reports, which revealed that Zagreb acted on a red warrant issued by Interpol.
The case in Kazakhstan was based on the accusations of three crypto investors who alleged that in 2018, the Russian took their dollars but never sent them the Bitcoin they wanted to buy. It was closed in October 2024 after the court established that they were too incompetent to work with crypto wallets.
Another chapter in the Vinnik-Wex-BTC-e saga
Wex launched in September 2017 after BTC-e shut down earlier that year. The former was considered the successor of the latter, as it took over its customer database. Vasiliev was managing the new trading platform until its collapse in 2018.
His arrests were preceded by the disappearance of almost $500 million from accounts hosted on Wex, including some that belonged to European investors.
BTC-e’s alleged operator, Alexander Vinnik, was arrested in Greece in 2017. He was later extradited to France, where he was sentenced to five years in prison in December 2020.
Vinnik was then handed over to the U.S. in 2022, where he was held accountable for laundering up to $9 billion through the exchange. In May 2024, he pleaded guilty to money laundering charges.
Eventually, the United States exchanged Vinnik, in a prisoner swap with Moscow under President Trump, for American schoolteacher Marc Fogel, who had been held in a Russian prison since 2021 and had received a 14-year sentence for allegedly carrying medical cannabis in his luggage.
Earlier in June this year, Bloomberg Law reported that another suspected BTC-e operator, Belarusian national Aliaksandr Klimenka, has asked a U.S. judge to dismiss the case against him, arguing he could no longer have Vinnik testify on his behalf since his return to Russia.
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